Author : Pascal Mercier
What is it about : A Swiss professor in his late-fifties who specialised in ancient Greek, Hebrew and Latin Texts, met a Portuguese woman on his routine walk to school one rainy morning, an encounter which fired off his long-hidden desires and wishes - no, not an affair, but the desire to seek out life's many meanings. Our professor Raimund Gregorius, affectionately known to his students as Mundus, then stumbled upon a privately-published Portuguese book in an old book store, the book "A Goldsmith Of Words" set him off on a train journey to Lisbon to seek out and experience the Portuguese author, Prado's world of philosophies, emotions, and paradoxes as well as Prado's tumultuous relationships with his father, mother, sisters, friends, lovers, patients and Resistance comrades.
Some thoughts after
having read the book : The book put together the lives of the two main characters - Mundus and Prado pieces by pieces as the reader gradually grew to understand their world. The structure and layers of the book was intricately wovened and constructed as we slowly explored the world of Prado, a brilliant medical doctor, philosopher and child prodigy who later became a Resistance co-operator under the era of the Portuguese dictatorship, almost 30 years Mundus's senior. This exploration was actually carried out by Mundus as he visited and conversed with Prado's many surviving friends and relatives in Lisbon - Prado died of a brain hemorrhage in his late fifties, some thirty years before Mundus's interest in his life. The book was beautifully written and stylistically composed - here's a description I personally liked most from the book : Quiet and elegant. Like dull silver.
Would I recommend this book to you : I cannot give the book more praise for its unique style, delicate touches and dramatic encounters. The book could be read as an adventure, a self-reflective philosophical debate or as a tool to understand human emotions towards families, friends, foes and religion. Before you head off to the local library, here are a few gems for your pleasure:
"Is the soul a place of facts ? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories ?"
"We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there."
"Life is not what we live, it is what we imagine we are living."
"Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us - what happens to the rest ?"
